Our Actions

McKesson plays an important role in helping to deliver medication and supplies to customers and patients across North America. To help strengthen our supply chain, McKesson has put strategies in place to mitigate supply impacts and help our customers navigate challenging times.

Making Our Supply Chain More Resilient

McKesson is building continuous process improvement, redundancy and contingency planning into the system to help provide surety of supply and proactively mitigate potential points of failure.

• We work closely with supplier and manufacturer partners from multiple geographies to optimize our inventory levels and secure backup product.
• We are creating new models and ways of working such as the Critical Care Drug Task Force — a dynamic, cross-functional team of clinical pharmacists and supply chain professionals — to monitor, communicate and respond to supply chain trends and needs.
• We support merging and diversified suppliers with new product launches to bring greater supply to market.
• We utilize best-in-class global generics sourcing through ClarusONE, a joint venture between McKesson and Walmart, Inc. ClarusONE Sourcing Services helps to ensure both companies have access to the right generic pharmaceuticals to meet customer demand at a market competitive cost.

Maximizing Intelligence

We harness as close to real-time insights as possible to both the supply and demand sides of the equation to help anticipate disruptions or shortages and provide insights for channel participants about how to manage their inventories.

• Through the analysis of extensive datasets, including historical sales information, market trends and external factors, artificial intelligence algorithms can accurately predict potential shortages. This enables us to make well-informed decisions regarding inventory management, ensuring products are readily available when needed.
• Through Ontada and The US Oncology Network, we leverage our oncology data and insights to help anticipate the need for potential clinical alternative regimens.
• When there is a drug shortage, we harness our team of clinical experts, inclusive of pharmacists and physicians, to help predict where the demand will go and ready supply.

Supporting Equitable Access

Through McKesson’s breadth of services and solutions, we support a number of stakeholders within the healthcare ecosystem, which gives us a unique lens to understand their needs and help ensure medicines make it to where they are needed most. For example, as the centralized distributor of COVID-19 vaccines and ancillary supply kits for the U.S. government through September 2023, we played a key role in supporting access to the vaccine at point-of-care sites.

• We have an equitable allocation program in place that helps ensure pharmaceuticals are distributed across the country, including to health systems, specialty community-based clinics, chain retailers, community pharmacies and care facilities that reach underserved communities and populations.
• We have a distribution model that allows us to leverage the strength and range of our distribution center network to position inventory and deliver accordingly.
• We work to ensure open lines of communication with suppliers to receive improved guidance on product inventory, which allows us to adjust our allocation methodology to be more closely in line with supply and prevent interruptions.

Strengthening Security and Safety

Ensuring a safe and secure supply chain is paramount for delivering high-quality products safely and reliably from manufacturers to patients. Our commitment extends through every step of the supply chain, maintaining strict chain of custody standards.

• The Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) is meant to secure the U.S. supply chain and help protect consumers from exposure to drugs that may be counterfeit, contaminated or otherwise harmful by creating interoperable electronic traceability of products at the lot, unit and serialized package level.
• Over the last decade, we have worked to help prepare pharmacy customers and manufacturing partners for the implementation of DSCSA, including assisting with defining standards for DSCSA through industry collaboration; collecting Global Location Number (GLN) information and capturing serialized product identifiers to create DSCSA datasets for customers.